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Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. —Pema Chodron What do we avoid learning? Again and again. Love? Too easy. White Rabbit? Been done. Graffiti? Tell us. What would your scrawl to the last days of 2018 be? *** Thank you, Cin Norris: My life is being devoured. I am […]

“The flamboyant, charismatic editor and teacher Gordon Lish said, ‘Write what you’re most frightened of.’” Twenty-five years ago I was told I would feel the loss of… To be continued next week. For now, it is your turn to be still for at least thirty minutes. Computer off. Phone off. Only you “on”, doing nothing […]

Power of memory shines through in Bill T. Jones’ impressive ‘Analogy Trilogy.’ MARK SWED, MUSIC CRITIC for the LA Times “The sun has an appointment with the moon.” That is how a Jewish Belgian teenager, Dora Amelan, described her world turned upside down by the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1940. It is also, in […]

Someone lies on the floor just inside the last doorway. S/he is a friend, a parent, a child, an enemy, an unknown. S/he is old, young, of any race or gender. You know her/him. S/he is a stranger. Take us into this story. And, consider that we don’t always know what is real. What is […]

Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. — Pema Chodron You know what to do. Set a timer for 30 minutes. Do nothing. Reflect on the preceding weeks of this month. Pay attention to those moments those people, that Earth and what/how they taught you. Write for another […]

You probably know a wannabe writer – maybe the guy who’s going to start in on his fabulous book any day now and who tells you that this time next year he’ll be on his big Book Tour. He shows you his masterpiece and he’s maybe three pages into the next Great American Novel. Or maybe, […]

I had only a silent howl to express what I felt the first time last week that I looked out over the clear-cuts near the cabin in which I once lived. A day later, I went back to document the slaughter. The ruler is one-foot long. There are many more than 200 rings on the […]

You find this old pack near a forest trail; on a park bench; on your front step. You open it. Here is your prompt: I am the Other and I write the story of the person who once carried this pack. In the writing I will discover what is inside and why it was discarded. […]

We have what we are given until it is gone. We have the loss. Only in the loss do we really have choices. We can clutch at the past as we might try to grasp a particularly alluring raindrop. We can refuse the knowledge. We can tell ourselves stories of betrayal, deceit, illusion – or we […]

I sit across from my long-time friend in a hypothetically Mexican restaurant in a pit-stop off I-40. I’m swaddled in the gray cocoon of withdrawal. Not from a drug, unless you count my ability to use attention from a hypothetical beloved as a drug. (There’s a lot of “hypothetical” going around these days in my […]